Processing text with domain-specific spreading activation methods

ABSTRACT

A method for performing natural language processing of free text using domain-specific spreading activation. Embodiments of the present invention ontologize free text using an algorithm based on neurocognitive theory by simulating human recognition, semantic, and episodic memory approaches. Embodiments of the invention may be used to process clinical text for assignment of billing codes, analyze suicide notes or legal discovery materials, and for processing other collections of text. Further, embodiments of the invention may be used to more effectively search large databases, such as a database containing a large number of medical publications.

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is a Continuation Application of U.S. patentapplication Ser. No. 14/553,562, filed Nov. 25, 2014, which is aContinuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/006,813, filed Jan.4, 2008, now U.S. Pat. No. 8,930,178, which claims the benefit of U.S.Provisional Application No. 60/878,718, filed Jan. 4, 2007, each ofwhich is incorporated by reference in its entirety.

BACKGROUND

This invention relates to natural language processing and, morespecifically, to a method for performing natural language processing offree text using domain specific spreading activation.

SUMMARY

Embodiments of the present invention provide a computerized system andmethod for performing natural language processing of free text usingdomain-specific spreading activation. Embodiments of the presentinvention ontologize free text using an algorithm based onneurocognitive theory by simulating human recognition, semantic, andepisodic memory approaches. Embodiments of the invention may be used toprocess clinical text for assignment of billing codes, analyze suicidenotes or legal discovery materials, and for processing other collectionsof text, for example. Further, embodiments of the invention may be usedto more effectively search large databases, such as a databasecontaining a large number of medical publications.

In a first aspect, a method for processing natural language may includethe steps of providing a text, the text including a plurality of groupsof characters; providing a database, the database including associationsbetween a plurality of known words and a plurality of concepts, thedatabase further including quantitative values, each quantitative valuebeing representative of a strength of a relationship between a first oneof the concepts and a second one of the concepts; identifying one ormore of the plurality of groups of characters as corresponding to atleast one of the plurality of known words; creating a list of theidentified known words; querying the database to obtain a first set ofconcepts associated with each of the identified known words; andannotating the list of identified known words with the first set ofconcepts associated with each identified known word; querying thedatabase to obtain a second set of concepts, each concept in the secondset of concepts being associated with a concept in the first set ofconcepts; and annotating the list of identified words with the secondset of concepts by considering the quantitative value representative ofthe strength of the relationship between each concept in the second setof concepts and its associated concept in the first set of concepts.

In a detailed embodiment of the first aspect, the method may include thestep of preparing the text prior to the identifying step, the step ofpreparing the text including at least one of tagging parts of speech,replacing abbreviations with words, and correcting misspelled words. Themethod may include the step of providing an output including at leastone of the concepts in the first set of concepts. The step of annotatingthe list of identified words with the second set of concepts may includeremoving from the second set of concepts any of the second set ofconcepts that have a quantitative value that is less than apredetermined threshold value. The text may include clinical free text,for example; and the clinical free text may include pediatric clinicalfree text. The text may include a plurality of documents and the methodmay further include the step of identifying a subset of the plurality ofdocuments by identifying at least two documents having associations withat least one identical concept. The method may further include the stepof producing an output, the output including identification of one ormore portions of each of the at least two documents having associationswith the at least one identical concept. The text may include at leastone suicide note, for example, and the method may include the step ofevaluating at least the first set of concepts for indications ofsuicidal intent.

In a second aspect, a computer implemented method for assigning amedical billing code may include the steps of comparing, by a computer,a passage against a first ontology to recognize specific medicalconcepts in the passage; creating, by the computer, a semantic networkincluding specific medical concepts and related concepts; weighting, bythe computer, relationships between the specific medical concepts andthe related concepts, each relationship having a weight; identifying, bythe computer, the specific medical concept or related concept having aheaviest weight; and comparing, by the computer, the specific medicalconcept or related concept having the heaviest weight against a secondontology to identify a billing code associated with that specificmedical concept or related concept in the second ontology.

In a detailed embodiment of the second aspect, the step of creating, bythe computer, a semantic network may include querying a database toobtain the related concepts; and the step of weighting, by the computer,relationships between the specific medical concepts includes the step ofquerying the database to obtain a weight for each relationship betweenthe specific medical concepts and a weight for each relationship betweenthe specific medical concepts and the related concepts. The method mayinclude the step of, after the weighting step, removing from thesemantic network any related concepts that have a weight that is lessthan a predetermined threshold value. The step of creating the semanticnetwork may include a step of expanding the network by adding additionalrelated concepts, the step of expanding the network ending when one ofthe weights falls below a predetermined threshold. The second comparingstep may include the step of obtaining human assistance if the computerdoes not identify a billing code, the step of obtaining human assistanceincluding transmitting the passage to a human professional, assigning bythe human professional a billing code, and recording the assignedbilling code to be associated with the specific medical concept orrelated concept with the heaviest weight, by the computer, into theontology. The step of creating the semantic network may include a stepof expanding the network by adding additional related concepts, the stepof expanding the network ending when one of the weights falls below apredetermined threshold.

In a third aspect, a method for processing natural language may includethe steps of providing a text containing natural language; tagging partsof speech in the text; recognizing known words in the text; creating asemantic network, the semantic network including at least one of therecognized known words and at least one relationship with at least oneconcept associated with at least one of the recognized known words; andsupplementing the semantic network by adding additional concepts andadditional relationships to the semantic network, each additionalconcept being associated with at least one of the concepts and eachadditional relationship connecting at least one of the concepts to atleast one of the additional concepts.

In a detailed embodiment of the third aspect, the method may include thesteps of weighting each of the at least one relationships and each ofthe additional relationships with a weighting value reflecting thestrength of each relationship and additional relationship; determining aminimum threshold weighting value; and eliminating from the semanticnetwork the relationships and the additional relationships that do notsatisfy the minimum threshold weighting value. The method may includethe steps of comparing the at least one concepts and the additionalconcepts to a list of known relevant concepts to generate a list ofidentified relevant concepts; and providing an output based on at leastone of a number and a significance of the identified relevant concepts.The output may pertain to a probability of a particular occurrence. Thetext may include at least one suicide note and the particular occurrenceis a suicide attempt. The text may include a plurality of documents andthe method may include the steps of entering a query including a searchconcept; and displaying a list of documents including one or more of theplurality of documents that is associated with at least one of theconcepts and the additional concepts that matches the search concept.The list of documents may be sorted by the weighting value pertaining toat least one relationship or additional relationship between the searchconcept and the corresponding recognized known word.

These and other features and advantages of the present invention willbecome apparent to those skilled in the art upon consideration of thefollowing detailed description of preferred embodiments exemplifying thebest mode of carrying out the invention as presently perceived. Thedrawings are only to serve for reference and illustrative purposes, andare not intended to limit the scope of the invention.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE SEVERAL VIEWS OF THE DRAWINGS

The detailed description particularly refers to the accompanying Figuresin which:

FIG. 1 depicts an exemplary sample of clinical text;

FIG. 2 depicts an exemplary normalized version of the text of FIG. 1text with certain indentified concepts highlighted in bold;

FIG. 3 depicts exemplary links between concepts;

FIG. 4 is a screen capture of an exemplary ontologizer computer programoperating on an exemplary computerized system according to the exemplaryembodiments;

FIG. 5 depicts a sample of an exemplary corpus that has been parsed andcleansed for acronym, jargons, names, and dates;

FIG. 6 depicts an exemplary simplified schema for mapping text toconcepts;

FIG. 7 illustrates a chart providing disambiguation results of anexemplary study;

FIG. 8 is a graph of consistent concepts generated by an exemplaryembodiment of the present invention; and

FIG. 9 is a screen capture of an exemplary computer-based graphics tool,operating on an exemplary computerized system according to the exemplaryembodiments, for manually correcting the relations between conceptsaccording to the present invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

Embodiments of the present invention ontologize free text by using analgorithm based on neurocognitive theory. More specifically, embodimentsof the present invention simulate human recognition, semantic andepisodic memory approaches to ontologize text.

When embodiments of the present invention are applied in a computer tounderstand medical free text, for example, the first step is to teach analgorithm to recognize specific medical concepts that are found in anontology (pneumonia for example). Next, the algorithm creates a semanticnetwork of concepts related to pneumonia. For example, coughing, feverand chest x-ray may be related concepts. This semantic network can havemany nodes or just a few. As the linking of the concepts spreads, therelationships between the concepts are quantified with some weight. Atsome point the weight becomes less than a predetermined threshold andthe semantic network stops growing. This is because, if it were notconstrained, the semantic network could grow endlessly. From thisnetwork the item with the heaviest weight is selected and a billing codethat has already been integrated into the ontology (ontologies haverelationships between concepts) is assigned. If the computer does notknow what to do, it asks a Health Information Management professional tocurate the data. The system learns from the HIM professional andremembers the correct coding result, thereby expanding its knowledgebase. The entire cycle may be repeated for each new patient visit.

In other embodiments, the semantic network provides links to relevantinformation and concepts, such as the selection of appropriate drugs anddosages for certain diseases and conditions, analysis of suicide notes,and analysis of potentially large quantities of information, such asdiscovery information in a legal context.

Introduction

Multiple government agencies and numerous for-profit entities arecollaborating to create a national health record that can be used by allcaregivers. The hope is that a single medical record will be portable,reduce medical errors, avoid costly duplicate testing, and eliminateunnecessary hospitalizations. Its content, or the content of any medicalrecords, can be classified into two general types of data: structuredand unstructured. Structured data, such as laboratory results, havewell-defined data types and clear semantics. These data have relevantcells of output from a particular test, and can be relied on to containinformation in an expected way. By contrast, unstructured data,including such clinical free-text as transcribed discharge summaries,contain data whose interpretation may be substantially more challenging.Developing this electronic medical record is an enormous task and forthe near future will probably focus on prescribing and laboratory data.See, e.g., Perlin J, Gelinas L. Workgroup: Electronic Health Record:Laboratory Data Information Exchange. Paper presented at: AmericanHealth Information Community, 2006; Washington, D.C.

Unstructured data, however, cannot be ignored forever because itcontains a tremendous amount of knowledge that is essential for caredelivery. Moreover, with appropriate methods, this knowledge can becombined with genomic and proteomic data to form the informationsubstrate necessary for personalized medicine. See, e.g., Collier N,Nazarenko A, Baud R, Ruch P. Recent Advances in Natural LanguageProcessing for Biomedical Applications. International Journal ofBiomedical Informatics. 2006; 75:413-417.

Unfortunately, this clinical free-text's lack of structure, heavyreliance on abbreviations, acronyms, medical jargon, redundancy, andambiguity make it even more resistant to thorough analysis than, forexample, newspaper text.

Attempts to mine clinical free-text have not been vacuous, as thepotential value of these data is widely acknowledged. These attemptshave included: mining the data for quality of care purposes,administrative purposes, and scientific discovery. See, e.g., Heinze DT, Morsch M L, Hollbrook J. Mining Free-Text Medical Records. Paperpresented at: AMIA, 2001; 2001; Yeh A, Hirschman L, Morgan A. Evaluationof Text Data Mining for Database Curation: Lessons Learned from the KDDChallenge Cup. Bioinformatics. 2003; 19(Supp 1):i331-i339; and SchwartzA, Hearst M. A Simple Algorithm for Identifying Abbreviation Definitionsin Biomedical Texts. Paper presented at: Pacific Symposium onBiocomputing, 2003; Hawaii.

They have, however, had limited success for reasons related to the text,methods, or availability of training data. For definiteness, we assumethat the prototypical instance of clinical free-text is a clinical noteof some type; e.g., discharge summary that has been dictated by aphysician-specialist, transcribed by a medical typist and is intended tobe read by a second medical practitioner, perhaps the patient's primarycare provider.

Our analysis indicates that automatically mining such text ischallenging for three closely related reasons. First, medical providerswill use the technical language that they know, a language that isfilled with special terms. Second, clinical free-text is more likespeech than text. Third, most Natural Language Processing (NLP) toolsare tuned for newspaper text.

Despite these difficulties, the methods described herein provide uniqueadvantages for mining clinical free-text because the rhetoricalstructure of clinical free-text is simpler than biomedical journals, thedomain expertise is not infinite, existing NLP tools are trainable, andclinical free-text is holistic in nature, in the sense that decisionsabout how to interpret potentially ambiguous language are (or should be)linked by the common underlying influence of a hidden variable—thepatient's state.

We believe that the human memory architecture provides a model forsemantic processing of clinical free-text. The natural mode of humansemantic interpretation will also work holistically under the assumptionof simple underlying causes. The difficulty that we all experience inaccepting or even understanding nuanced arguments is evidence of thisassumption. Therefore, a goal of this invention is to enhance theaccuracy of pediatric clinical free-text mining by developing domainspecific spreading activation methods that mimic human memory models.

Spreading activation is a neuro-cognitive model that attempts tosimulate human memory by creating networks of information, calledsemantic networks. This fundamental neuron-cognitive process and relatedcomputational approach are rarely acknowledged in the natural languageprocessing of clinical free-text. Yet, it is reasonable to propose thatby involving some form of artificial memory, e.g., recognition, semanticand/or episodic, clinical free-text can be mined more effectively.

Like other artificial intelligence methods, spreading activation relieson training corpora. Since annotation is costly, the methods of thepresent invention heuristically bootstrap valid corpus annotations byinitially annotating smaller corpora; then relying on technology toextend the latter into heuristically valid annotations of a much largercorpus. For these efforts, two corpora can be developed using anonymizeddata. Linguists and clinicians operating in a careful system of qualitycontrol will create one corpus, the Cincinnati Pediatric SupervisedCorpus (CPSC). Part-of-Speech (POS) quality will be monitored in formalreviews, and corrected as necessary. Unified Medical Language System(UMLS) concepts will be added to the Cincinnati Pediatric UnsupervisedCorpus (CPUC). The CPUC is an existing corpus of 590,000 tokens that hasbeen randomly selected from pediatric transcriptions, scrupulouslyanonymized and then semi-automatically annotated with POS labels. See,e.g., Pestian J P, Itert L, Meyer S. Development of the CincinnatiPediatric Clinical Corpus. International Journal of BiomedicalInformatics. 2006; Forthcoming.

An exemplary embodiment of the present invention may be adapted toachieve several goals. First, using our encryption broker andontologizer software, develop a disambiguated an anonymous CPSC byreviewing and disambiguating 30-50 clinical documents from the followingsubspecialties: radiology, nephrology, pulmonary, behavioral medicine,psychiatry, rheumatology, pathology, cardiology, allergy and immunology,critical care, hematology/oncology, and human genetics.

Second, evaluate the quality of the CPUC's POS tagging. This can be doneby a generalization of the methodology adopted in the Manchester taggerpaper combined with techniques for using componential tags originallydeveloped in by Feldman, Hana and Brew. See, e.g., Hana J, Feldman A,Brew C. Buy One Get One Free or What To Do When Your Linguist Resourcesare Limited. Paper presented at: International Seminar on ComputerTreatment of Slavic and East-European Languages, 2004; Bratislava,Slovakia; Hana J, Feldman A, Brew C. A Resource-Light Approach toRussian Morphology: Tagging Russian Using Czech Resources. Paperpresented at: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural LanguageProcessing, 2004; Barcelona, Spain; and Feldman A, Hana J, Brew C. ACross-Language Approach to Rapid Creation of New Morpho-SyntacticallyAnnotated Resources. Paper presented at: Fifth International Conferenceon Language Resources and Evaluation, 2006; Genoa, Italy.

Third, use spreading activation methods to annotate the CPUC with UMLSconcepts. The results of this can be evaluated using methods similar tothose developed by Brew and Walde. See, e.g., Brew C, Walde S S.Spectral Clustering for German Verbs. Paper presented at: Conference onEmpirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2002; Philadelphia,Pa.

Fourth, test the spreading activation method on anonymized clinicalfree-text. Then train the spreading activation tool with the developedcorpora. Retest the same clinical free-text and compare results.

Fifth, evaluate neurocognition concept-mapping techniques, such asspreading-activation of semantic processing, against more traditionalmethods, such as template/relation extraction and spectral clustering.See, e.g., Brew C, Walde S S. Spectral Clustering for German Verbs.Paper presented at: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural LanguageProcessing, 2002; Philadelphia, Pa.; Ng A Y, Jordan M, Weiss Y. OnSpectral Clustering: Analysis and an Algorithm. Paper presented at:Neural Information Processing Systems, 2002; Vancouver, BritishColumbia; and Klein D, Manning C D. Corpus-Based Induction of SyntacticStructure: Models of Constituency and Dependency. In: Cohen P, Clark A,Hovy E, Oates T, Witbrock M, eds. Language Learning: AnInterdisciplinary Perspective. Stanford, Calif.; 2004.

Memory Models

Communication is a fundamental activity of human life. In all cultures,human bonding is achieved and maintained largely through speech (see,e.g., Levelt W J M. Producing Spoken Language: A Blueprint of theSpeaker. In: Brown C M, Hagoort P, eds. The Neurocognition of Language.Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1999:83-122) and understanding thatspeech. After all, we are social animals, who deeply care for ourclosest kin and for unity in our daily personal contacts. Fundamental tocommunication is memory. Knowing the memory models and their theoreticalunderpinnings is basic to conducting research on memory-basedinformation retrieval.

Comprehension and communication require various forms of memory. It isin memory that those who receive or send messages have the capacity tocommunicate by combining current and previous facts. A number of memorymodels have been studied over time; they can be divided in various ways,i.e., long and short-term memory, working memory, declarative memory,procedural memory or recognition memory, semantic memory and episodicmemory. This description focuses on the last three and only thosebiological components that are germane to their computational modeling.

Recognition, Semantic and Episodic Memory

Recognizing elements in the environment, faces and places, as well asthe ability to orient oneself within the environment are crucial today-to-day functioning and navigation. Through recognition memory oneidentifies objects, words or actions. See, e.g., Gerlach C, Aaside C T,Humphreys G W, Gade A, Paulson O B, Law I. Brain activity related tointegrative processes in visual object recognition: bottom-upintegration and the modulatory influence of stored knowledge.Neuropsychologia. 2002; 40(8):1254-1267; Jernigan T L, Ostergaard A L,Law I, Svarer C, Gerlach C, Paulson O B. Brain activation during wordidentification and word recognition. Neurolmage. 1998; 8(1):93-105; andDecety J, Grezes J, Costes N, et al. Brain activity during observationof actions. Influence of action content and subject's strategy. Brain.1997; 120(10):1763-1777.

Recognition memory is fundamental to our ability to remember. Itrequires a capacity both for identification and for judgment about theprevious occurrence of what has been identified. See, e.g., Mandler G.Recognizing: The Judgment of Previous Occurrence. Psychological Review.1980; 87:252-271.

Semantic memory and episodic memory are closely aligned. Semantic memoryrefers to the memory of meanings, understandings, and other factualknowledge. Semantic memory is a structured record of the facts, conceptsand skills that we have acquired. The information in semantic memory isderived from the information in one's episodic memory, so that we canlearn new facts or concepts from our experiences. See, e.g., Tulving E.How Many Memory Systems Are There? American Psychologist. 1985;40:385-398.

Episodic memory is the recollection of events. It includes time, place,and associated emotions that affect the quality of memorization;episodic memory contrasts and interacts with semantic memory. Episodicmemory is thought of as being a “one-shot” learning mechanism. You needonly one exposure to an episode to remember it. Semantic memory, on theother hand, can take into consideration multiple exposures to eachepisode. For example, semantic memory indicates what a patient looks andsounds like. All episodic memories concerning that patient will refer tothis single semantic representation, and conversely, all new episodesabout that patient will modify the single representation of thatpatient. Some researchers believe that episodic memories are refinedinto semantic memories over time. Others believe that you alwaysremember episodic events as episodic memories. See, e.g., Tulving E.Elements of Episodic Memory. Oxford: Clarendon Press; 1983; EncyclopediaWTF. Emotion and Episodic Memory. Wikimedia Foundation; and Griffiths DP, Dickson A, Clayton N S. Declarative and Episodic Memory: What CanAnimals Remember About Their Past? Trends Cogn Sci. 1999; 3:74-80.

Using these components, a computer implemented schema for acquiring andunderstanding clinical free-text, for example, can be described. First,the computerized system recognizes the clinical free-text (recognitionmemory). The clinical free-text is then clustered into known concepts,say asthma or medications (semantic memory). Semantic memory determinesif there are any episodes related to these concepts. If so, then theconcept and episodes are linked together. For example, the patient'slast visit for asthma treatment might be connected to the asthma conceptand the patient's response to a specific medication might be connectedto the medication concept. These connected concepts and episodes form asemantic network. Semantic memory then spreads to other concepts andepisodes. For example, once the asthma concept is connected to thepatient's last visit, there may be a recollection that this patient hada genetic test that indicated variants to the ADAM and PHF11 genes. Thisepisode would then be connected to a secondary concept called asthmagenetics, which would then be connected back to the patient via theasthma concept. This spreading will occur until, for some reason, it isstopped.

Semantic Networks

Semantic networks, originally introduced in 1968, have played asignificant role in knowledge representation. See, e.g., Quillan R.Semantic Memory. In: Minsky M, ed. Semantic Information Processing.Cambridge: MIT Press; 1968:216-270. According to Quillan's definition,semantic networks express knowledge in terms of concepts, theirproperties, and the hierarchical sub-superclass relationship amongconcepts. A node represents each concept. Connecting the concepts with aline that represents an “is-a” or “instance-of” link depicts therelationship between concepts. For example, sometimes asthma onset“is-a” response to environmental stresses like smoke. Since Quillan'sdefinition, the term semantic network has come to be used in a far moregeneral sense in the knowledge representation literature. Researchershave often used the term Semantic Network to refer to an AssociativeNetwork: a generic network of information items in which these items arerepresented by nodes, and links with undefined and unlabeled associativerelations among the information items. When statistical techniques areused to associate weights to the links, a measure of the strengthbetween associations is created thus, creating a semantic network.Processing semantic networks is usually done be means of spreadingactivation. See, e.g., Crestani F. Application of Spreading ActivationTechniques in Information Retrieval. Artificial Intelligence Review.1997; 11(6):453-482.

FIGS. 1-3 provide a graphical representation of a semantic network thatincludes the memory models previously discussed. See, e.g., MatykiewiczP, Duch W, Pestian J P. Nonambiguous Concept Mapping in a MedicalDomain. Paper presented at: Artificial Intelligence and Soft ComputingICAISC, 2006; Poland. In FIG. 1, anonymous clinical text is presented.In FIG. 2, the normalized text 200 is shown, along with the concepts(highlighted in bold) that are found in the UMLS. Above the text, nodes202 represent individual concepts, e.g., asthma; these nodes are labeledwith the UMLS's text of the represented concept. At this point there areno semantic associations among nodes, and the only active concepts arethose in the clinical free-text. FIG. 3 shows the links 204 betweenthese concepts after the network has been iterated three times and athreshold of 0.1 is applied. That is, at iteration zero, concepts in theUMLS are identified in the clinical free-text if their weights meet theselected threshold. After that first iteration, the initial set ofrelationships is assigned to the initial concepts shown. This starts thespreading activation process. After the second iteration, additionalconcepts are selected if their weights meet the threshold. Anyassociated relationships are then assigned to the concept based on theresults of the first iteration. After the third iteration, additionalconcepts are identified if their weights meet the selected threshold.Relationships are then assigned to these concepts based on the resultsof the second iteration.

The weights used in this process are based on the conditionalprobability of an concept χ occurring N times given the presence of χThus, P(Σχ|χ). For example, within the UMLS (version 2005AB) the conceptof asthma has a Concept Identifier (CUI) of c004096. The UMLS has over6,000 relationships to c004096. If the concept and its semantic network(represented by a matrix that is described in the Methods section)appeared only once then it would have a weight P(1|6000) or 0.00016. Onthe other hand, if the concept and its semantic network appears 500times, then the weight P(500|6000) or 0.083. So, the relationship of0.083 is greater than 0.00016. In the example in FIGS. 1-3, if theconcept weight is greater than or equal to a pre-selected threshold,then the concept is considered sufficiently active to include it in thegraph of consistent concepts. This example also highlights theimportance of developing methods that limit the size of the semanticnetwork by applying some constraints. Otherwise, the semantic networkwould always grow to its edges. The rules for constraining a semanticnetwork are described under the Spreading Activation section. Allconditional probabilities are pre-computed using the information fromULMS.

Spreading Activation

Spreading activation theory falls into the category of associativeinformation retrieval. The idea behind this form of informationretrieval is that it is possible to retrieve relevant information byretrieving information that is “associated” with information that theuser has already retrieved and is known to be relevant. See, e.g.,Crestani F. Application of Spreading Activation Techniques inInformation Retrieval. Artificial Intelligence Review. 1997;11(6):453-482. It is well known that simple matching procedures betweenthe vocabularies contained in the query formulation and the storeddocuments do not always produce acceptable retrieval output. For thatreason, some methods have been introduced to expand the query'sformulation by adding to the initial queries new terms, or expressionsthat are related to the originally available terms. See, e.g., Salton G.Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval. New York: McGraw Hill;1968 and Doyle L B. Information Retrieval and Processing. Los Angeles:Melville Publishing; 1975.

In principle, it is possible to use generally valid term or documentassociations for the expansion operation from say, an available termthesaurus. The term activation represents a numerical value intended torepresent some aspect of the unit. The term spreading indicates thatover time a unit's activation spreads to other units. For example, ifthe units in a model are terms related to psychiatric admissions to thehospital, the activation may be the probability that there are enoughterms in a data file to indicate there is an extraordinary amount ofpsychiatric admissions.

Historically, other methods of computing locally valid terms anddocument associations have been attempted. They include such methods asthe associative linear retrieval method, the maximum spanning tree ofterm similarities method, and the attempts to supply expanded documentrepresentations using citations and other bibliographic indicatorsattached to text and documents. See, e.g., Giulano V E, Jones P E.Linear Associative Information Retrieval. In: Howerton P, ed. Vistas inInformation Handling. Washington, D.C.: Spartan Books; 1983; Robertson SE, van Rijsbergen C J, Porter M F. Probabilistic Models of Indexing andSearching. In: Oddy R N, Robertson C J, van Rijsbergen C J, Williams PW, eds. Information Retrieval Research. London: Buttersworth;1981:33-56; and Fox E A. Extending the Boolean and Vector Space Modelsof Information Retrieval with P-Nor Queries and Multiple Concept Types.Ithaca: Computer Science, Cornell University; 1983.

The utility of these methods, however, has been limited for such reasonsas: the inability to generalize the selected query terms, potentiallycorrelated terms, potential dependence of one document on another thus,violating randomness, and the fact that simplified theoretical modelsmay not reflect the reality of existing relationships between documentsand terms in operational situations. See, e.g., Lesk M E. Word-wordAssociations in Document Retrieval Systems. American Documentation.1989; 20(1):27-38; Raghavan V V, Wong S K M. A Critical Analysis of theVector Space Model for Information Retrieval. Journal of AmericanSociety for Information Science. 1989, 37(5):279-287; and Yu C T,Buckley C, Lam K, Salton G. A Generalized Term Dependence Model inInformation Retrieval. Information Technology: Research and Development.1983; 2(4):129-154.

Like the other methods, spreading activation networks were originallyfound to have a restricted utility, mainly for the reasons describedabove. See, e.g., Salton G, Buckley C. On the Use of SpreadingActivation Methods in Automatic Information Retrieval. Ithaca: CornellUniversity; 1988. National Science Foundation Grant Number IRI 87-02735.

Spreading activation was then revised based on supposed mechanisms ofhuman memory operations. Originating from psychological studies, it wasfirst introduced in the area of artificial intelligence to provide aprocessing framework for semantic networks and has since been adopted bysuch areas as: cognitive science, databases, biology and informationretrieval. See, e.g., Rumelhart D, Norman D. Representation in Memory:Technical Report. La Jolla: Psychology and Institute of CognitiveScience, UCSD; 1983. The basic spreading activation network model,however, requires domain expertise adaptations to make it moreappropriate for domain specific applications.

How Spreading Activation Works

The spreading activation network model in its “pure” form utilizes aconceptually simple processing technique on a networked data structure.The networked data structure comprises nodes connected by links, asshown in FIG. 3. The nodes are usually labeled with the names of theobjects they intend to represent. Representation between the objects, asshown by arrows, can be labeled or weighted. The structure hasadvantages because it could represent either a semantic network or anassociative network. See, e.g., Crestani F. Application of SpreadingActivation Techniques in Information Retrieval. Artificial IntelligenceReview. 1997; 11(6):453-482.

The spreading activation network processing technique comprises asequence of iterations that continue until stopped by some terminationrequirement. Iterations include: at least one pulse—which is made ofpre-adjustment, spreading and post-adjustment phases—and a terminationcheck. See, e.g., Berger H, Dittenbach M, Merklm D. An AdaptiveInformation System Based on Associative Networks. Paper presented at:Proceedings of the first Asian-Pacific Conference on ConceptualModeling, 2004; Dunedin, New Zealand.

During the pre and post adjustment phases, some type of decay functionthat weakens the relationship between nodes can be included. Thisapproach implements a form of “loss of interest” in nodes that are notcontinually activated. As a result, links to these nodes in futureiterations are not made.

The spreading phase includes a number of passages of activation thatpulse from one node to all other nodes connected to it. Initially, aninput value must be computed as shown in equation 1:

Equation 1. Spreading Activation Input Function

$I_{j} = {\sum\limits_{i}{Oiw}_{ij}}$

where:

I_(j) is the total input of node j

O_(i) is the output of unit i connected to node j

w_(ij) is a weight associated to the link connecting node i to node j

The inputs and the weight are usually real numbers. Their type, however,can be determined by the specific requirement of the application beingmodeled. For example, they can be binary (0 or 1), excitatory/inhibitory(+1 or −1), or real, to represent the strength of the relationshipsbetween nodes. Once a node's input has been calculated, the output valuemust be calculated. Like the input, the output's numerical type isdetermined by its application, with the two most frequent being binaryor real weights. Since the output value is calculated based on afunction of the input value, it is represented as shown in equation 2:

Equation 2. Spreading Activation Output FunctionO _(j) =f(I _(j))

A number of different functions are available for evaluation of theoutput function. See, e.g., Crestani F. Retrieving Documents byConstrained Spreading Activation on Automatically Constructed Hypertext.Paper presented at: Proceedings of the EUFIT 98—Fifth European Congresson Intelligent Techniques and Soft Computing, 1997; Aachen, Germany. Thethreshold function, as shown in equation 3, is the function mostcommonly used in spreading activation networks. It is used to determineif the node j has to be considered active or not. The application of thethreshold function in equation 2 in the case of binary value gives:

Equation 3. Spreading Activation Evaluation Function

$O_{j} = \begin{Bmatrix}0 & {I_{j} < k_{j}} \\1 & {I_{j} > k_{j}}\end{Bmatrix}$

where k_(j) is the threshold value for unit j.

Like the other functions, the threshold value of the activation functionis application-dependent and can vary from node to node, thusintroducing the dependence of threshold on node, k_(j). Once the outputvalue is computed the node sends it to all other nodes connected to it,usually sending the same value to each of them. These pulses ofspreading activation continue until some termination criterion is met.This process yields activation levels that are interpreted based on theapplication. In essence, this is a neural network model; although inreal biological networks concepts are represented by the activation of anumber of neural microcircuits. A single node representing a conceptreplaces an entire sub-network, and the links between the nodes estimatethe transition probability between sub-networks, determining thestrength of associations between concepts.

The pure spreading activation model, however, presents somedifficulties:

-   -   Activation may spread over the entire network unless controlled        carefully during the pre- and post-adjustment phases.    -   Information provided by the labels associated to the links is        not fully used, i.e., there is no use of the semantics for the        associations.    -   It is difficult to implement some form of inference based on the        semantics of association.

Understanding the diverse relationship between nodes, or developingdomain-specific methods for spreading, and using competition between thenetworked nodes can help solve these problems. For example, theinformation on the labels may be used to process links based on thelabel's semantics. Another way of restricting activation is to usevarious spreading constraint techniques such as: the distance, fan-out,path, and activation constraints. With the distance constraint,activation should cease when it reaches nodes that are far away in termsof the links covered to reach them. This constraint corresponds to thesimple heuristic rule that the strength of the relationship decreaseswith increasing differences. With the fan-out constraint, spreadingactivation should cease at nodes with very high connectivity, i.e.,fan-out to a large number of nodes. With path constraints, activationshould spread using preferential paths, reflecting application-dependentinference rules. Finally, as in biological networks, where energy supplyis limited, competition between the nodes leads to inhibition of nodesrepresenting mutually exclusive interpretations, while activationconstraints use a threshold function at a single node level to controlspreading activation. See, e.g., Berger H, Dittenbach M, Merklm D. AnAdaptive Information System Based on Associative Networks. Paperpresented at: Proceedings of the first Asian-Pacific Conference onConceptual Modeling, 2004; Dunedin, New Zealand.

Use of Spreading Activation

Spreading activation has received attention in a number of domains.Earlier works include Shoval's development of interactive queryexpansion based on a particular semantic network. See, e.g., Shoval P.Abstraction in Semantic Networks: Axiom Schemata for Generalization,Aggregation and Grouping. Paper presented at: Proceedings of ACM SIGIR,1981.

GRANT, developed by Cohen and Kjeldsen, is a successful spreadingactivation system for information retrieval. GRANT organizes knowledgeabout research proposals and potential funding agencies by using asemantic network. From a heuristic point of view, GRANT can beconsidered an inference system. See, e.g., Cohen P, Kjeldesen R.Information Retrieval by Constraining Spreading Activation on SemanticNetworks. Information Processing and Management. 1987; 23(4):255-268.

Croft designed the I³R system to study the possibility of retrievingdocuments by “plausible inference.” This system was designed as a searchintermediary that uses domain knowledge to infer concepts that arerelated to those mentioned in the query. A number of additionalapplications spawned from that research have focused on browsingtechniques and how I³R could constrain spreading activation networks.See, e.g., Croft W. Approaches to Intelligent Information Retrieval.Information Processing and Management. 1987; 23(4):249-254; Croft W,Lucia T, Cohen P. Retrieving Documents by Plausible Inference: APreliminary Study. Paper presented at: Proceedings of ACM SIGIR, 1988;Grenoble, France; Croft W, Lucia T, Cohen P, Willet P. RetrievingDocuments by Plausible Inference: An Experimental Study. InformationProcessing and Management. 1989; 25(6):599-614; and Croft W, Thompson RH. I3R: A New Approach to the Design of Document Retrieval Systems.Journal of American Society for Information Science. 1987;38(6):389-404.

More recently, spreading activation networks have been used to findinformation in text illustrations, context-sensitive vocabulary mapping,automatically constructed hypertext, and searching the semantic web.See, e.g., Crestani F. Retrieving Documents by Constrained SpreadingActivation on Automatically Constructed Hypertext. Paper presented at:Proceedings of the EUFIT 98—Fifth European Congress on IntelligentTechniques and Soft Computing, 1997; Aachen, Germany; Hartman K,Strothotte T. A Spreading Activation Approach to Text Illustration.Paper presented at: Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium onSmart Graphics, 2002; Hawthorne, New York; Lee J, Dublin D.Context-Sensitive Vocabulary Mapping with a Spreading ActivationNetwork. Paper presented at: Proceedings of the 22nd AnnualInternational ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development inInformation Retrieval, 1999; Hawthorne, New York; and Rocha C, SchwageD, Poggi Aragao M. A Hybrid Approach for Searching in the Semantic Web.Paper presented at: International World Wide Web Conference, 2004; NewYork, N.Y.

Spreading activation has also been used in numerous brain modelingstudies. They have included the use of spreading activation networks onword priming in schizophrenic patients, brain activation in autismdisorders, frontal lobe activation, visual cortex activation, prefrontalactivation, judgment, lexical neighbors, semantic priming, noun andpronoun production, episodic memory retrieval, age groups, andunconscious brain activation. See, e.g., Barch D, Cohen J,Servan-Schreiber D, Steingard S, Steinhauer S, van Kammen D. SemanticPriming in Schizophrenia: An Examination of Spreading Activation UsingWord Pronunciation and Multiple SOAs. Journal of Abnormal Psychology.1996; 105(4):592-601; Nelissen R M, Dijker A J, de Vries N K.Limitations of semantic priming procedures for automatic goalactivation. Psychol Rep. December 2005; 97(3):675-689; Harris G J,Chabris C F, Clark J, et al. Brain activation during semantic processingin autism spectrum disorders via functional magnetic resonance imaging.Brain Cogn. Feb. 10, 2006; Blacker D, Byrnes M L, Mastaglia F L,Thickbroom G W. Differential Activation of Frontal Lobe Areas by Lexicaland Semantic Language Tasks: A Functional Magnetic Resonance ImagingStudy. Journal of Clinical Neuroscience. January 2006; 13(1):91-95;Burton H, McLaren D G. Visual cortex activation in late-onset, Braillenaive blind individuals: an fMRI study during semantic and phonologicaltasks with heard words. Neurosci Lett. Jan. 9, 2006; 392(1-2):38-42;Miotto E C, Savage C R, Evans J J, et al. Bilateral activation of theprefrontal cortex after strategic semantic cognitive training. Hum BrainMapp. April 2006; 27(4):288-295; Tieleman A, Seurinck R, Deblaere K,Vandemaele P, Vingerhoets G, Achten E. Stimulus pacing affects theactivation of the medial temporal lobe during a semantic classificationtask: an fMRI study. Neurolmage. June 2005; 26(2):565-572; Mo L, Liu HL, Jin H, Yang Y L. Brain activation during semantic judgment of Chinesesentences: A functional MRI study. Hum Brain Mapp. April 2005;24(4):305-312; Seghier M L, Lazeyras F, Pegna A J, et al. Variability offMRI activation during a phonological and semantic language task inhealthy subjects. Hum Brain Mapp. November 2004; 23(3):140-155; RossellS L, Bullmore E T, Williams S C, David A S. Brain activation duringautomatic and controlled processing of semantic relations: a primingexperiment using lexical-decision. Neuropsychologia. 2001;39(11):1167-1176; Jescheniak J D, Schriefers H, Hantsch A. Semantic andphonological activation in noun and pronoun production. J Exp PsycholLearn Mem Cogn. July 2001; 27(4):1058-1078; Herrmann M, Rotte M, GrubichC, et al. Control of semantic interference in episodic memory retrievalis associated with an anterior cingulate-prefrontal activation pattern.Hum Brain Mapp. June 2001; 13(2):94-103; Toyota H. Changes in thesemantic constraint of spreading activation of memory across three agegroups. Percept Mot Skills. October 2000; 91(2):385-390; and Kiefer M,Spitzer M. Time course of conscious and unconscious semantic brainactivation. Neuroreport. Aug. 3, 2000; 11(11):2401-2407.

Clinical Free-Text

In the delivery of clinical care, a detailed record of environmentalinformation, diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, and economicinformation is kept on paper or in the form of electronic artifacts. Attimes, this information is from a structured vocabulary, such asresponses to drop-down boxes in a clinical order entry menu, which arestored electronically. At other times, such information is clinicalfree-text that has been dictated by a caregiver and then transcribedonto the appropriate artifact. This clinical free-text is different fromformally structured text, such as that found in manuscripts orabstracts. It has no formal structure and is heavily laden withspecialty-specific jargon, abbreviations, and acronyms. See, e.g.,Pestian J P, Itert L, Andersen C L, Duch W. Preparing Clinical Text forUse in Biomedical Research. Journal of Database Management. 2005,17(2):1-12.

Moreover, NLP studies utilizing clinical free-text are still rare andrequire unavailable corpora including medical records. See, e.g.,Collier N, Nazarenko A, Baud R, Ruch P. Recent Advances in NaturalLanguage Processing for Biomedical Applications. International Journalof Biomedical Informatics. 2006; 75:413-417.

Some researchers, however, have indicated that there may be somestructure to scientific communication, including clinical free-text.See, e.g., Carnap R. The Logical Syntax of Language. London: Kegan;1934; Harris Z. The Structure of Science Information. J Biomed Inform.2002; 35(4):215-221; Friedman C, Alderson P O, Austin J H, Cimino J J,Johnson S B. A general natural language text processor for clinicalradiology. J Am Med Inform Assoc. March-April 1994; 1(2):161-174;Friedman C, Kra P, Rzhetsky A. Two biomedical sublanguages: adescription based on the theories of Zellig Harris. J Biomed Inform.August 2002; 35(4):222-235; and Sager N, Lyman M, Bucknall C, Nhan N,Tick U. Natural language processing and the representation of clinicaldata. J Am Med Inform Assoc. March-April 1994; 1(2):142-160.

These studies, however, have focused on clinical free-text with adultpatients and not pediatric patients. Since many terms specific topediatric care, e.g., tetralogy of fallot, are not specific to adultcare and many terms specific adult care are not specific to pediatriccare, e.g., myocardial infarction, there is no certainty that theirresults are generalizable to the pediatric setting.

Conducting NLP on clinical free-text presents a number of particularchallenges:

-   -   a) The text is generated by a medical practitioner for a medical        practitioner, and assumes knowledge of medical terminology,        concepts, and abbreviations.    -   b) The text is informal, more like speech than written language,        and it cannot be assumed that it has undergone a careful        editorial process. Good medical typists may smooth out some        infelicities, but they will also introduce errors not present in        the original spoken text.    -   c) With few exceptions (see, e.g., Tsuruoka Y, Tateishi Y, Kim        J-D, et al. Developing a Robust Part-of-Speech Tagger for        Biomedical Text. Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Springer;        2005:382-392.) the freely available tools that exist for NLP are        tuned for newspaper text and have much higher error rate when        applied to biomedical text. Recent work in Dr. Brew's lab offers        potentially useful technology for handling the informality of        the text, but much work remains. See, e.g., Li J, Brew C,        Fosler-Lussier E. Robust Extraction of Subcategorization Data        from Spoken Language. Paper presented at: Ninth International        Workshop on Parsing Technology, 2005; Vancouver, British        Columbia and Brew C. Language Processing: Statistical Methods.        In: Brown K, ed. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd        Ed. Oxford: Elsevier; 2006.

Despite these difficulties, clinical free-text may prove more tractablethan other text types:

-   -   1. The rhetorical structure of a clinical free-text may be        considerably simpler than that of a biomedical journal article,        for example. See, e.g., Teufel S. Argumentative Zoning for        improved citation indexing. In: Shanahan J, Yan Q, Wiebe J, eds.        Computing Attitude and Affect in Text: Theory and Applications.        Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer; 2005:159-170. Feltrim V,        Teufel S, Gracas-Nunes G, Alusio S. Argumentative Zoning applied        to Critiquing Novices' Scientific Abstracts. In: Shanahan J, Yan        Q, Wiebe J, eds. Computing Attitude and Affect in Text: Theory        and Applications. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer;        2005:233-245. The latter will often be making a complex        argument, while the former is providing relatively concrete        information about the patient and the medical team's assessment        of what may need to happen next.    -   2. The background information that the writer of a clinical        free-text may rely on is certainly technical in nature, but        should not go significantly beyond what can be assumed from the        generality of medical practitioners. This is important, because        much of the relevant information is likely to be present in some        form, either in the UMLS or similar resources. This is typically        not true for journal articles, which typically involve        hard-to-capture specialist terms. Regardless, clinical        free-texts are a target of opportunity because of the good match        to existing resources.    -   3. Existing NLP tools are trainable. Both the Manchester tagger        and the TreeTagger can be tuned to new text-types by training        against corpora. Even very small-annotated corpora of the right        text type can make a big difference to performance. See, e.g.,        Tsuruoka Y, Tateishi Y, Kim J-D, et al. Developing a Robust        Part-of-Speech Tagger for Biomedical Text. Lecture Notes in        Computer Science: Springer; 2005:382-392.    -   4. The discharge summary is holistic in nature, in the sense        that decisions about how to interpret potentially ambiguous        language are (or should be) linked by the common underlying        influence of a hidden variable—the patient's state. In word        sense disambiguation, a one-sense-per-discourse heuristic has        often proved fruitful, even for relatively complex texts. The        present invention takes this approach further, by building        heuristic models that are open to a wider range of linkages        between the various decisions to be made.

Part-of-Speech Tagging

Part-of-speech tagging plays an important role in NLP. Obtaining theappropriate POS enables parsing for phrases and concepts within thetext. The intent is to use POS for disambiguating clinical free-text.For example, the two sentences provide two different POS tags for thetoken patient.

-   -   Jane is a patient.    -   Jane is patient with her therapy.

In the first sentence patient is a noun, in the second it is anadjective. Based on the UMLS (2005AD) in the first sentence the conceptwould be patient; in the second sentence the concepts would be patientand therapy. Proper POS is essential for disambiguating text so conceptscan be identified, but if POS tagging is used solely the results will bemixed.

One of the first studies to address the question of whether tagginghelps in parsing was reported by Pulman in 1992. In this study, a taggerwas trained on the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen corpus and used as apreprocessor to the Core Language Engine. See, e.g., Pulman S. UsingTagging to Improve Analysis Efficiency. In: Thompson H, ed. SALT/ELSNETWorkshop on Sub-language Grammar and Lexicon; 1992 and Alshawi H, CarterD, Crouch R, Pulman S, Rayner M, Smith A. CLARE: A Contextual Reasoningand Cooperative Response Framework for the Core Language Engine.Cambridge: SRI International; 1992. The process resulted in a loss ofaccuracy in parsing, though it did increase parsing speed. Accuracy wasregained by the use of a multiple tagger, a tagger that returns morethan one tag for each word. See, e.g., Pulman S. Using Tagging toImprove Analysis Efficiency. In: Thompson H, ed. SALT/ELSNET Workshop onSub-language Grammar and Lexicon; 1992.

Subsequently, Wauschkuhn reported on a study of two German corpora; onewas hand-tagged, and the other was statistically tagged, with an errorrate of 3.5% to 4%. Both corpora were parsed twice: once with tags, andonce without tags but with a morphological analyzer. No gold standardfor either corpus existed, so the metric of success was the number ofsentences receiving a single parse in each case. See, e.g., WauschkuhnO. The Influence of Tagging on the Results of Partial Parsing in GermanCorpora. Paper presented at: Fourth International Workshop on ParsingTechnologies, 1995; Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic. This study sufferedfrom several problems. First, the tags assigned by the morphologicalanalyzer did not correspond to the hand-tagged results, which madecomparison of the results difficult. Second, it was not expected thattagging alone would completely disambiguate a sentence; sentences inclinical free-text may be structurally ambiguous, even with the sametags, so using a metric that defines success as obtaining a single parsedoes not seem appropriate. Third, the grammar used in the test seemsquite small since the majority of sentences got either zero or one parsefor both the tagged and the untagged corpus.

Artificial intelligence studies related to the use of unsupervised andsupervised training have also been conducted. Brill (1995) presented anew algorithm for unsupervised training of a rule-based, POS tagger. Therule-based tagger trained using this algorithm significantlyoutperformed the traditional method of applying the Baum-Welch algorithmfor unsupervised training of a stochastic tagger. Additionally, theauthors have shown that combined unsupervised and supervised learningcan develop a tagger that significantly outperforms a tagger trainedusing purely supervised learning. See, e.g., Brill E. UnsupervisedLearning of Disambiguation Rules for Part of Speech Tagging. Paperpresented at: Proceedings of the Third Workshop of Very Large Corpora,1995. Pakhomov, et al. used three clinical domain experts to POS tag acorpus of clinical notes. These experts were able to accurately tag anduse it for training English and Medical corpora. The accuracy of machinetagging for the English corpus was 89.79% and the Medical corpus was94.69%. The authors indicated the necessity for adaptingstate-of-the-art POS taggers to the sublanguage domain of clinical text.See, e.g., Pakhomov S, Coden A, Chute C G. Developing a Corpus ofClinical Notes Manually Annotated for Part-of-Speech. InternationalJournal of Medical Informatics. 2006; 75(6):418-429.

Confidentiality

Clinical free-text artifacts will usually also be considered highlyconfidential and presently must meet the security requirements of theHealth Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. See, e.g.,Madsen E, Masys D R, Miller R A. HIPPA Possumus. J Am Med Inform Assoc.May-June 2003; 10(3):294. Both manual and automated attempts have beenmade to make these data confidential without losing their contextualvalue; retaining contextual value is important for research on naturallanguage. For example, Pestian et al. reviewed 71,000 clinical trigramsfrom pediatric discharge summaries and surgical notes to develop rulesfor normalizing, anonymizing and converting abbreviations and acronymsinto clinical free-text. This analysis yielded 350 specific expertrules, a database of female and male first names, a database of surnamesand software for processing the clinical free-text. These data and thesoftware are entitled the Encryption Broker (“EB”).

The EB was tested on 1,000,000 clinical free-text tokens. The resultsindicated that while the rule based system was particularly good atnormalizing the clinical free-text, converting abbreviations andacronyms to full text, and anonymizing patient and physician names, itdid not do as well in anonymizing specific geographical concepts, e.g.,the west side of town. In fact, after manually reviewing the original1,000,000 tokens 410,000 tokens were removed so that confidentialitywould not be violated. The final results created the CincinnatiUnsupervised Pediatric Corpus. See, e.g., Pestian J P, Itert L, Meyer S.Development of the Cincinnati Pediatric Clinical Corpus. InternationalJournal of Biomedical Informatics. 2006; Forthcoming and Pestian J P,Itert L, Andersen C L, Duch W. Preparing Clinical Text for Use inBiomedical Research. Journal of Database Management. 2005; 17(2):1-12.It is quite plausible that using domain-specific, spreading activationmethods, clinical free-text can be anonymized with higher accuracy.First, however, the adaptive machine learning systems are to be trained.

Machine Learning from Corpora

Natural language processing researchers often turn to the use ofcorpora, or bodies of text, to provide them with an understanding of thelanguage structure and use. Although Chomsky, in 1968, argued againstthe use of corpora in linguistics on the grounds that the interestingquestions about language were much too complex to be answerable from asmall sample of the language, (see, e.g., Chomsky N. Language and Mind.New York: Harcourt Brace; 1968) development and use of corpora isroutine to computational linguistics. There are a number ofwell-established corpora, such as: WordNet (a large database of Englishterms with semantic relations), Penn TreeBank (a large database of termsfrom various news stories, technical publication, and the Brown corpus),ACIP (Asian classical works), ACET (English, American and westernliterature), Moby (Shakespearian works), NCSTRL (computer sciencetechnical report library).

These corpora are from either a general language source or aconglomeration of general language sources. Unfortunately, becauseclinical-free text has a different structure than these sources, theyare not viable for natural language processing research that involvesclinical free-text. Currently there is only one known publicly availablecorpus of clinical free-text (we exclude corpora of edited biomedicalliterature because it lacks the free text aspect, and because of thepreviously mentioned likelihood of complex discourse goals such asargumentation). This corpus is the Cincinnati Unsupervised PediatricCorpus. It contains 590,000 clinical tokens and part-of-speech tags. Onereason for this absence of corpora is due to the confidentiality ofmedical data another is that organizations typically like to keep thisvaluable data for their own research. In our work we have created oneadditional annotated corpus, the Cincinnati Supervised Training Corpus,and annotated the Cincinnati Unsupervised Pediatric Corpus by validatingthe part-of-speech tags and including UMLS concepts. It is through thisprocess that we also introduce novel machine learning methods.

These corpora are important. First, they may be useful for training andcomparison of medical NLP systems. Second, even a small amount ofmedical corpora can have a large impact on part-of-speech (POS) taggingof medical texts as long as domain expertise is incorporated. See, e.g.,Pakhomov S, Coden A, Chute C G. Developing a Corpus of Clinical NotesManually Annotated for Part-of-Speech. International Journal of MedicalInformatics. 2006; 75(6):418-429. The study of the Manchester taggerbacks this up by demonstrating that there can be significant transfer oflearning from one type of medical text to another. Learning the patternsof the Genia corpus helps with Pubmed abstracts in other domains. Weexpect to find the same thing in pediatric clinical free-text. See,e.g., Kim J-D, Tomoko O, Teteisi Y, Tsujii J. Genia Corpus—ASemantically Annotated Corpus for Bio-Textmining. Bioinformatics. 2003;19 (suppl.)(1):190-182 and Tateishi Y, Tsugita A. Part-of-SpeechAnnotation of Biology Research Abstracts. Paper presented at: Proc. ofLanguage Resources and Evaluation Conference, 2004; Paris, France.

Aspects of the Approach

Semantic networks and spreading activation have been used in 1)computational models of brain functions; 2) semantic networks torepresent various features of semantic memory and; 3) associative searchin information retrieval. These applications have been based onsmall-scale networks that were usually constructed manually as aknowledge-engineering exercise. See, e.g., Crestani F. Application ofSpreading Activation Techniques in Information Retrieval. ArtificialIntelligence Review. 1997; 11(6):453-482. Applications of spreadingactivation networks in information retrieval either follow the linksbetween documents, (see, e.g., Crestani F, Lee P L. Searching the Web byConstrained Spreading Activation. Information Processing and Management.2000; 36(4):585-605.) or use some measure of statistical similaritybetween documents. Statistical approaches to natural language processingare based on word co-occurrences, trying to capture meaning in contextwindows. The following attributes are desirable but missing fromprevious approaches:

-   -   Recognizing the overall topic, weakly priming all concepts        associated with a specific area (for example, one or more        medical domains), and thus anticipating possible meanings.    -   Recognizing characteristic concepts that will strongly prime        relevant network nodes, creating initial seed activations.    -   Using real knowledge to approximate semantic memory associations        of an expert for spreading activations from already active        concepts to related concepts.    -   Building consistent interpretations of the text analyzed        (episode), by adding new concepts found in the text, expanding        acronyms and abbreviations for those meanings that best fit the        active sub-network thus, increasing the overall consistency of        text interpretation.    -   Inhibiting competing interpretations to restrict spreading of        activations using known constraints that increase overall        consistency of interpretation, including active searching when        ambiguities persist.        As a result, detailed annotation of texts, based on        interpretation of the larger fragments rather than local        context, can be realized.

Synopsis

A goal of the computer implemented systems and methods of this inventionis to enhance the accuracy of clinical free-text mining by developingdomain specific spreading activation methods that mimic human memorymodels.

Spreading activation is a neuro-cognitive model that attempts tosimulate human memory by creating networks of information, calledsemantic networks. This fundamental neuron-cognitive process and relatedcomputational approach are rarely acknowledged in the natural languageprocessing of clinical free-text. Yet, it is reasonable to propose thatby involving some form of artificial memory, such as recognition,semantic and episodic, clinical free-text can be mined more effectively.It is hypothesized that reaching human level competence in understandingclinical and other free-texts calls for a neuro-cognitive approach thatrequires memory based models that rely upon, for example, a annotatedpediatric corpus and that providing such a corpus will enablesignificant scientific advances in natural language processing.

Like other artificial intelligence methods, spreading activation relieson training corpora. Since annotation is costly, we attempt toheuristically bootstrap valid corpus annotations by initially annotatingsmaller corpora; then relying on technology to extend the latter intoheuristically valid annotations of a much larger corpus. For theseefforts two corpora are employed using anonymized data. Linguists andclinicians operating a careful system of quality control can create onecorpus, the Cincinnati Pediatric Supervised Corpus (CPSC).Part-of-Speech (POS) quality can be monitored in formal reviews, andcorrected as necessary. Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) conceptscan be added to the Cincinnati Pediatric Unsupervised Corpus (CPUC). TheCPUC is an existing corpus of 590,000 tokens that has been randomlyselected from pediatric transcriptions, scrupulously anonymized and thensemi-automatically annotated with POS labels. See, e.g., Pestian J P,Itert L, Meyer S. Development of the Cincinnati Pediatric ClinicalCorpus. International Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2006;Forthcoming.

Methods

The approach used here is to simulate semantic/episodic memory usingULMS knowledge (concept and relations) to create a Graph of ConsistentConcepts (GCC) that represents text as an active part of semanticmemory. GCC has a number of parameters that may be tuned by using anannotated corpus. This section describes the experimental process andmethods that we use to test the hypothesis: Neurocognitive methods, suchas spreading activation (represented by a GCC), trained on an annotatedpediatric corpus may have greater accuracy than alternative methods.

Annotation Process

Annotating the Cincinnati Supervised Training Corpus

The initial step is to develop the CSTC, a domain specific supervisedtraining corpus. This can be done by randomly selecting 30-50 clinicalfree-text reports from pediatric radiology, nephrology, pulmonary,behavioral medicine, psychiatry, rheumatology, pathology, cardiology,allergy and immunology, critical care, hematology/oncology, and humangenetics. Our encryption broker will anonymize and normalize much of thefree text, (see, e.g., Pestian J P, Itert L, Andersen C L, Duch W.Preparing Clinical Text for Use in Biomedical Research. Journal ofDatabase Management. 2005; 17(2):1-12.) our ontologizer (see FIG. 4)will assign UMLS concepts to these data. The text will then be presentedto clinical experts to disambiguate any ambiguous concepts via theOntologizer software. Our clinical experts will review the assignedconcepts. If a concept is ambiguous, the expert will select theappropriate concept from the list of provided concepts. FIG. 4 shows theconcept disambiguation interface. Concepts may be color-coded. Forexample, the identified concepts that have been disambiguated in thissession may be colored green. Concepts in blue may have beendisambiguated in previous sessions. Yellow concepts may need to bedisambiguated during this session. In an exemplary embodiment, theconcept colored red may be the one that is currently beingdisambiguated. A list of options 208 from the UMLS for the red token islisted below the text 206. The software may also provide inter-raterconsistency and reliability reports. For example, a report ofconsistency between raters can be printed. If the raters were notconsistent, the classifications may be discussed between the ratersuntil agreement is made. Upon completion of this process, supervisedcorpora with expert classification will be developed.

Annotating the Cincinnati Unsupervised Training Corpus

Currently, the CUTC contains individual tokens 210 and a hand annotatedPOS 212. A sample is shown in FIG. 5. The sample shows the text after itwas parsed and cleansed for acronym, jargons, names, and dates. Forexample, in the original text, the last token 210 (before the “.”)listed was changed from “d/c” to “discharge”. Each token 210 has alsobeen tagged with the appropriate part of speech 212 using the PennTreebank tagset. In this tagset, NN is a singular noun, JJ is anadjective, CC is a coordinating conjunction, IN is a preposition, CD isa cardinal number, and VBD is a past-tense verb. When the CUTC wasdeveloped, the quality of the POS tags was not established. Using themethods described in the Quality Assessment section, the POS tags of theCUTC can be evaluated.

The procedure for measuring the quality of the CUPC is described below.Samples of the corpus, however, will need to be created. Sentences fromthe CUTC are randomly selected until there are at least 5,000 tokens.These tokens can then be retagged by hand. This tagging process includestriple checks of accuracy. That is, three different people will tag anuntagged 5,000-token corpus with the Penn Treebank tag set. Their tagswill then be compared for internal consistency. If an item isinconsistent, a senior linguist will review it, and the tags will bemade consistent. This initial training set will be put in the formatrequired by TreeTagger or the most appropriate POS tagger at that time.The POS tagger will be trained using the sample of 5,000 tokens. Thetrained POS tagger will then be used to annotate the entire CUTC.

Measuring Annotation Quality

There are two types of evaluation: evaluating the quality of handtagging of the CSTP, and evaluation of the machine-based tagging. Thesecond evaluation is not the same as evaluating the spreading activationmethod against other information retrieval methods; rather, it is anevaluation of the quality of the corpora being developed. Evaluating thespreading activation method is discussed below.

The kappa coefficient and its possible variants may be used to evaluatemachine-based annotation with the hand tagged POS, or POS taggingbetween two hand-taggers. The kappa coefficient provides an estimate ofthe proportion of agreement above chance. Kappa index is often used indiagnostic procedures when different binary response variable(Presence/absence) are used on a large number of subjects/patients, andeach patient is “rated” by two or more diagnostic procedures orclinicians. When the classification procedure of interest, such as thepresent annotation (concepts) issue, has multiple nominal categories(tags), assessment of agreement becomes somewhat more involved.

There may be a machine-based procedure and one manual procedure or twomanual tagging procedures. Each token of clinical free-text may beassigned one of possibly 40 or more different types of tags (from PennTreeBank) for each procedure. The tagging process by any of the twomethods (be it two manual taggers or one manual and one machine-based,or both machine-based—one with spreading activation and the otherwithout) may be summarized as an R×R square contingency table, wherex_(ij) denotes the number of tokens that are tagged as “i” by oneprocedure, e.g., manual, and as “j” by another, e.g., machine,procedure, i=1, 2, . . . , R, j=1, 2, . . . , R. R is the total numberof possible tags. A tag-specific measure of agreement may be obtained toexamine the extent to which the two processes tend to lead to consistentconclusions with respect to the particular tag.

In this process there is an implicit assumption that the particularnature of any disagreements are not of interest. The R×R table will becollapsed to a 2×2 table constructed by cross-classifying tokens withbinary indicators such that a particular POS (say NN) is tagged by bothprocedures or not. A tag-specific kappa statistic may be obtained foreach tag providing, as many kappa statistics as there are tags. Inaddition, an overall summary index of agreement will also be obtained.The composite measure of agreement across all the tags (an over allkappa) may be obtained as a weighted average of individual kappa values,where the weights are denominators of the individual kappa values.Statistical Analysis System (SAS) may be used to compute all indices.Although there may be “high-dimension” contingency tables with largenumber of cells with 0 or sparse cell frequencies, SAS is well equippedfor obtaining exact Kappa statistics in these conditions.

There is a theoretical upper limit of each Kappa that is a function ofthe marginal frequencies (i.e., the prevalence of various tags for theentire set of tokens in the annotated text). In particular, the estimateof kappa can take a maximum value of 1 only when the marginalfrequencies are exactly equal and all off-diagonal cells are zero. Oncethe kappa statistic is computed, it will also be represented indescriptive terms. Landis and Koch provide ranges that suggest, beyondwhat one would expect by chance, Kappa>0.75, typically representingexcellent agreement, 0.40<Kappa<0.75, fair to good agreement, andkappa<0.40 as poor agreement. See, e.g., Landis J R, Koch G G. TheMeasurement of Observer Agreement for Categorical Data. Biometrics.1977; 33(159-174). While there is some appeal to this convenientframework, caution should be used when accepting the results,particularly in view of the large number of tags and the dependence ofkappa on marginal frequency of various tags in the sample. Once theinvestigators have approved the quality, the completed CSTC may then beused to train a spreading activation model that may applies UMLSconcepts to the CUTC.

Concept Mapping Using Spreading Activation and Competing Models

The concept mapping research is divided into four sections: assignmentof UMLS identifiers, full concept identification, concept weightingcomputation, and decay function computation.

Assignment of UMLS Identifiers

In this phase, 50% of the annotated CUTC may be used to train thespreading activation software described above. After the training iscomplete, the software may be used on the other half of the CUTC todetermine the appropriate CUI, Every Word Identifier (EUI), and WordUnique Identifier (WUI) found in the UMLS. The training and test partsmay then be reversed and the procedure repeated (two-foldcross-validation procedure).

FIG. 6 presents a simplified schema for mapping text to concepts. Inthis case the token appearance 214 is assigned to a WUI found in theUMLS (note the WUI connection line terminates at the token). The phrasenormal in appearance 216 is assigned to a SUI found in the UMLS (note inthe figure the SUI connection line terminates at the phrase boxboundary). This phrase has an established concept in the UMLS entitlednormal tissue morphology (Finding) 218. Every word (EUI) in the text ismapped to its normalized form (WUI). Unique string identifiers (SUI) arecomposed for the WUI.

Concept Identification and Mapping

To map phrases (SUI) to concepts (CUI) the following algorithm can beused on each token:

a) Using the trained POS tagger, assign POS tags to every token.

b) Map all the words to their normalized forms.

c) Scan normalized words from the end of the text.

-   -   a. If a POS tag matches one of the symbols:        -   i. Cardinal Number (CD), adverb (RB), adjective or numeral,            ordinal (JJ), Noun (NN), Verb (VB), Listed item marker (LS),            Symbol (SYM), start scanning the text from the current            position towards the beginning of the text. Add words to a            phrase that match mentioned POS tags until there is a phrase            that is not in the UMLS        -   ii. 3b. Resume after the position where the last UMLS phrase            was found.

d) Finish when at the beginning of the text.

The paragraphs below show a test of this approach using a radiological(ultrasonography) transcription that was mapped to a concept space,using the algorithm described above that was built into the software.The second paragraph shows the identified concepts in bold.

Original Text: “Fever, left flank pain, pyelonephritis. The right kidneyis normal in sonographic appearance with no evidence of scarring,hydronephrosis or calculi. It measures XXXX cm, which is normal forpatient's age. The left kidney is enlarged. It measures XXXX cm inlength. No focal areas of abnormal echogenicity or scarring are seen. Nohydronephrosis or calculi are identified. Images of the bladderdemonstrate no abnormality. Enlargement of the left kidney, which maysuggest acute pyelonephritis. This could also represent a normalvariant. Normal appearing right kidney.”

Normalized and UMLS Concept Identified Text: “fever, left flank pain,pyelonephritis. the right kidney be normal in sonographic appearancewith no evidence of scar, hydronephrosis or calculus. it measure xxxxcm, which be normal for patient's age. the left kidney be enlarge. itmeasures xxxx cm in length. no focal area of abnormal echogenicity orscar be see. no hydronephrosis or calculus be identify. image of thebladder demonstrate no abnormality, enlargement of the left kidney,which may suggest acute pyelonephritis. this can also represent a normalvariant. normal appear right kidney.”

Concept Weighting

The next phase is to weight the SUIs and CUIs. To do so, the relationalfile, MRREL.RRF, contained in the UMLS (edition 2005AB) may be used.This file contains 5,499,792 unique relationships between EUIs in amatrix form. The CUI concepts linked by these relations form a hugesemantic network, but only a small sub-network is important to analyze agiven text. A weight linking pair of concepts (two nodes in the graph)is computed using relational matrix entries. The weights are defined asconditional probabilities:w _(ij) =P(j|i)=C(CUI _(i) ,CUI _(j))/N(CUI _(i))

-   -   where:    -   W={w_(ij)} weight matrix with weights between i-th and j-th        concept CUI, C(CUI_(i), CUI_(j)) is the number of co-occurrences        of CUI_(i) and CUI_(j) concepts in the relational table row, and    -   N(CUI_(j)) is the number of occurrences of a CUI_(i) concept in        the relational table.

Weights between concepts resulting from mutually exclusiveinterpretations of phrases or acronyms should be negative, leading toinhibition of some concepts. For example, CCU may be expanded as “CancerCare Unit” or “Coronary Care Units”, but if some strongly active nodesrelated to heart, cardiology or similar concepts are already present thesecond concept will be preferred and spreading of activation shouldinhibit the first concept; to achieve this strong inhibitory response,links between the preferred concept should be present. These linksshould be added between all distinct concepts that are proposed ascandidates. The National Library of Medicine's MetaMap software mayassist in this stage.

Decay Function

All well-defined and unambiguous concepts are used to activate the graphnodes as a first step to create a graph of consistent concepts (GCC)(see FIG. 3). Activation then spreads from active node to active node.Calculating the activation weights of these nodes is done usingEquation 1. Connections are non-symmetric, and two active nodes maystrengthen their activity, thus mutually activating each other. To makesure the spreading does not occur over the entire network a constraintmust be applied. As noted earlier, the distance, the fan-out, and thepath activation constraint have been traditionally employed to constrainactivation. Except for inhibition, a decay function will be introducedas a novel method for slowing activation spread over the network. Thismethod includes the concept of time, something not used in the otherconstraints. In this type of constraint activation potential can bespread according to W matrix as the activation potential α

-   -   Equation 4. Decay Function        α^((t+1)) =w _(ij) H(α(t))+α(t)    -   where:    -   w_(ij)=the weight of cell ij in matrix W    -   H is either a step function or sigmoidal function (Equation 3),        (see, e.g., Rocha C, Schwage D, Poggi Aragao M. A Hybrid        Approach for Searching in the Semantic Web. Paper presented at:        International World Wide Web Conference, 2004; New York, N.Y.)        and    -   t=time, also referred to as iteration number.    -   α<1=is a decaying parameter        Using this decay function α can determine if the next pulse        should occur down a particular path, or that path is ignored.        The UMLS, though big, is a very general knowledge base and lacks        the specific weights that would be available with expert        knowledge or that could be learned from annotated corpus.

In an exemplary study, two small radiology corpora were created. Eachcorpus had 30 chest x-ray transcriptions, for six different diseases. Anassumption was made that the most consistent concepts would have thehighest activation. The initial unsupervised weights were able to givemaximum activation of only 79% of the correct concepts. A radiologistthen reviewed the text and disambiguated any ambiguous concepts usingthe ontologizer software shown in FIG. 4. This supervised training setwas then used to train the spreading activation software for identifyingconcepts in similar radiology transcriptions. By manually adding correctrelationships, correct concept identification increased to 96%. FIG. 7compares these results. It shows that the second corpus is much moresemantically complicated and harder to learn.

Accuracy With and Without Training.

Enriching UMLS relations means adding N(CUIi) and C(CUIi, CUIj) for allpairs of concepts from an annotated text. To check the usefulness of theproject, an accuracy measure that focuses only on the ambiguous mappingswas used. If the maximally activated CUI corresponds to a manuallychosen CUI, a point was added. Overall, Corpus I had 140 ambiguousphrases and Corpus II had 301 phrases.

Evaluation

Several aspects of the proposed design may be evaluated. Firstly, themere act of training on clinical free-text may improve performance onpart of speech tagging. Here there is no option but to create a smallgold-standard corpus, evaluate inter-rater reliability of the taggingtask then use the tagger to construct the kind of analysis that is foundin Tsuruoka et. al. For example, Tsuruoka's part-of-speech tagger isspecifically suitable for biomedical text. It was built based on thecyclic dependency network with maximum entropy modeling with inequalityconstraints. See, e.g., Toutsanova K, Klein D, Manning C D, Singer Y.Part-of-Speech Tagging With a Cyclic Dependency Network. Paper presentedat: HLT-NAACL, 2003. It was evaluated on three corpora: the Wall StreetJournal corpus, the GENIA corpus, and the PennBioIE corpus. Resultsindicated that adding data from different domains did not hurt theperformance of the POS tagger and the POS tagger had very goodperformance (97% to 98%). See, e.g., Tsuruoka Y, Tateishi Y, Kim J-D, etal. Developing a Robust Part-of-Speech Tagger for Biomedical Text. Paperpresented at: Advances in Informatics—10th Panhellenic Conference onInformatics, 2005; Volos, Greece. It was, however, not tested withpediatric or any clinical free-text. Since we are using the PennTreebank tagset we have the luxury of using the results of Tsureoka et.al., for comparison. We may achieve results better than the preliminaryresults that Tsuruoka et. al, report for phrase chunking, because wemake use of information about the presence or absence of a phrase inUMLS, while they do not.

Secondly, holistic processing of the text using spreading activation mayproduce good disambiguation decisions. A relevant comparison here isn-gram based WSD technology, as used by Pedersen and Lapata and Brew,2004. See, e.g., Pedersen T. An Ensemble Approach to Corpus Based WordSense Disambiguation. Paper presented at: Proceedings of the Conferenceon Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, 2000;Mexico City and Lapata M, Brew C. Verb Class Disambiguation UsingInformative Priors. Computational Linguistics. 2004; 30(1):45-73. Ifaugmented with a simple implementation of the one-sense-per-discourseheuristic, this will provide an inexpensive but reasonably well-informedbaseline against which to compare the spreading activation technology.Standard evaluation techniques for word-sense disambiguation apply.There are some technical difficulties that will arise because priorerrors in phrase chunking may prevent the disambiguation component fromeven seeing some of the candidates that should have been identified anddisambiguated. In this case we will quote precision and recall figuresboth for the system as a whole and for the individual components, in thelatter case taking account of the fact that the disambiguation componentshould not be blamed for the failings of the segmenter.

Thirdly, spreading activation may make those things similar that oughtto be similar and those different that ought to be different. Sincespreading activation induces a similarity structure between the nodes ofthe graph, it may be possible to use it to average over the whole corpusand obtain affinity scores. See, e.g., Brew C, Walde S S. SpectralClustering for German Verbs. Paper presented at: Conference on EmpiricalMethods in Natural Language Processing, 2002; Philadelphia, Pa. Thisevaluation treats spreading activation as a whole-corpus clusteringprocedure, and can be evaluated in the same way as either standard orspectral clustering methods.

Example Data Set

One way to illustrate an example data set is to compare how a medicalrecords professional would determine a radiology billing and how anembodiment of the present invention does it. Assume that the patientdischarge report includes the following statement:

-   -   This patient had a history of left ureteral stone. Small renal        calculus in the renal pelvis cause mild left hydronephrosis.        Possible intrarenal left stone is also noted.        The medical records professional would start by recognizing that        the information is related to renal disorders. Then, key        concepts are identified. Here they are italicized.    -   This patient had a history of left ureteral stone. Small renal        calculus in the renal pelvis cause mild left hydronephrosis.        Possible intrarenal left stone is also noted.        After this, the medical records professional weights the        information in his/her mind and assigns a billing code.

Now, when an embodiment of the present invention processes the samestatement, it will first normalize the text. Next, it will identifymedical concepts in the normalized text (the medical concepts shownitalicized in the normalized text below):

-   -   this patient have a history of left ureteral stone. small renal        calculus in the renal pelvis cause mild left hydronephrosis.        possible intrarenal left stone be also noted.        Next, as shown in FIG. 8, a semantic network 220 is formed and        weights are assigned. FIG. 8 is a graph of consistent concepts        generated by an exemplary embodiment of the invention. When the        oval “Etiology Aspects” 100 is selected, the column on the right        102 lists the possible sources and weights associated with        etiology. Here “calculi” 104 had the heaviest weight. Other        nodes show that “left” 106, “small” 108 and “possible” 110        cluster together. From this network the item with the heaviest        weight is selected and a billing code that has already been        integrated into the ontology is assigned. It the a billing code        is not yet associated with the item having the heaviest weight,        a Health Information Management professional may be queried by        the system to curate the data and manually assign a billing        code. The system may learn from the HIM professional and it may        remember the correct coding result thereby expanding its        knowledge base. Finally, the entire cycle is repeated for each        new patient visit.

While the example dataset is used in the process of assigning a billingcode for a medical facility, it will be appreciated that the inventioncan be used for many medical and non-medical purposes. For example, andwithout limitation, the invention can be used for mining largeinformation sources (legal discovery materials, for example), analyzingsuicide notes, and for creating an artificial expert which may beuseful, for example, to enhance delivery of personalized medical care.

Neurocognitive computing is germane to legal research in that it canprovide a semantic network of past knowledge and use that network tofind relationships in current knowledge. For example, during thediscovery stage it may find that Joe Smith could not be responsible forhit-and-run because he was receiving a speeding ticket at the time ofthe hit-and-run. The methods enable the discovered information to belinked using natural language processing methods like spreadingactivation.

In another application, embodiments of the invention may be used toanalyze suicide notes. Suicide notes and recorded discussions withsuicidal patients are artifacts of the patient's inimical thoughts.These patients are generally experiencing some level of psychache.Psychache refers to the hurt, anguish, soreness, aching, psychologicalpain in the psyche. See, e.g., Shneidman E S. Suicide as psychache. JNerv Ment Dis. 1993; 181:145-147. Psychache perturbs the mind to a pointwhere suicide becomes an escape from this pain. See, e.g., ShneidmanEdwin. How I read. Suicide Life Threat Behav. 2005; 35:117-120.

In all age groups suicide notes are left behind between 15% and 43% oftime, but there is evidence that the higher percentage is skewed by age.See, e.g., O'Donnell I., Farmer R., Catalan J. Suicide Notes BritishJournal of Psychiatry. 1993; 163:45-48; Salib E, El-Nimr G, Yacoub M.Their last words: a review of suicide notes in the elderly. Med Sci Law.2002; 42:334-338; and Salib E, Cawley S, Healy R. The significance ofsuicide notes in the elderly. Aging Ment Health. 2002; 6:186-190. Whatis in a suicide note? Menniger suggested that “the wish to dies, thewish to kill and the wish to be killed must be present for suicide tooccur”, (see, e.g., Menninger K. Man against himself. Harcourt Brace1938) but there is a paucity of research exploring the presence of thesemotives in suicide notes. Brevard, Lester and Yang analyzed notes to seeif Menniger's concepts were present. Without controlling for gender,they reported more evidence for the wish to be killed in suicide notesof completors than the notes of non-completors. See, e.g., Brevard A,Lester D, Yang B. A comparison of suicide notes written by suicidecompleters and suicide attempters Crisis. 1990; 11:7-11. Laaneers, et alrevisited Menninger's triad and compared 22 suicide to 22 parasuicidenotes that were carefully matched. They concluded that the notes fromcompletors were more likely to have content reflecting anger or revenge,less likely to have escape as a motive, and, although it was notstatistically significant, there was a tendency to show self-blame orself-punishment. In another study of 224 suicide notes from 154subjects, note-leavers were characterized as young females, ofnon-widowed marital status, with no history of previous suicideattempts, no previous psychiatric illness, and with religious beliefs.Suicide notes written by young people were longer, rich in emotions, andoften begging for forgiveness. Another study noted that statements foundsignificantly more frequently in genuine notes included the experienceof adult trauma, expressions of ambivalence; feelings of love, hate andhelplessness, constricted perceptions, or loss and self-punishment. Oneimportant and consistent finding is the need to control for differencesin age and gender. See, e.g., Leenaars A. A., Lester D., Wenckstern S.,Rudzinski D., Breward A. A comparison of suicide notes written bysuicide notes and parasuicide notes Death Studies. 1992; 16.

Determining the likelihood of a repeated attempt by ideators andattempters is an important role of a medical facility's psychiatricintake unit and notoriously difficult because of a patient's denial,intent for secondary gain, ambivalence, memory gaps, and impulsivity.See. e.g., Freedenthal Stacey. Challenges in assessing intent to die:can suicide attempters be trusted? Omega (Westport). 2007; 55:57-70. Oneindicator of the severity and intent is simply the presence of a suicidenote. Analysis has shown that patients presenting at an emergencydepartment with non-fatal self-harm and a suicide note suggests thatthese patients were likely to be at increased risk for completingsuicide at a later date. See, e.g., Barr Wally, Leitner Maria, ThomasJoan. Self-harm or attempted suicide? Do suicide notes help us decidethe level of intent in those who survive? Accid Emerg Nurs. 2007;15:122-127. Evidence of a suicide note, may illuminate true intentionsbut, the lack of one does not squelch questions. For example, without anote is the patient substantially really less severe, or how manypatients committed suicide without leaving a note behind? Is there adifference between the notes of completors and attempters? Valente'smatched notes from 25 completors and attempters found differences inthematic content like fear, hopelessness and distress. On the otherhand, Leenaar's found no significant difference between thematic groups.See, e.g., Valente Sharon M. Comparison of suicide attempters andcompleters. Med Law. 2004; 23:693-714 and Leenaars A. A., Lester D.,Wenckstern S., Rudzinski D., Breward A. A comparison of suicide noteswritten by suicide notes and parasuicide notes Death Studies. 1992; 16.These studies, however, were unable to take advantage of current NLP andmachine learning (artificial intelligence) knowledge. Recently,Handleman incorporated basic NLP methods like word-counts and a roughapproximation of a semantic relationship between a specific word and aconcept. For example the concept of time was semantically represented bythe words day or hour. The univariate analysis using just word countfound no difference between notes. When gender was controlled, somesemantics differences like: positive emotions, time, religion, andsocial references emerge. See, e.g., Handelman Lori D, Lester David. Thecontent of suicide notes from attempters and completers. Crisis. 2007;28:102-104.

The NLP methods described herein are directly applicable to the analysisof suicide notes because they are the basis of a generalizable methodfor classification and text mining. In an initial experiment weconstructed a corpus of 66 suicide notes written between 1945 and 1953of which 33 are completors and 33 are simulated notes. See, e.g.,Shneidman E S, Farberow N L. Clues to Suicide. McGraw Hill Paperbacks1957. There is no analog to the UMLS for suicide notes, so we usedindividual words to create a feature space. This yielded a 66 rows×922columns matrix. Decision trees were chosen for the classification task.We tested the C4.5, CART, and Random Forest algorithms. Preliminaryclassification of texts revealed that words alone are goodsimulated/completor predictors. The results showed that approximately93% of the notes could be classified appropriately. See, e.g., PestianJ. P., Matykiewicz P. Comparison of machine learning algorithms:Distinguishing between real and simulated suicide notes. Submitted toAMIA Spring Conference 2008. Accordingly, exemplary embodiments of thepresent invention may be used to analyze suicide notes. Such analysismay assist a clinician in assessing the risk that an individual mayattempt suicide in the future.

Personalized Medicine is the delivery of health care that is based uponan individual's specific genotype, current clinical state andenvironmental conditions. Optimal personalized medicine decisionsrequire caregivers and case managers to have access to data not onlyabout the individual but also about the background medical knowledgethat should underpin individualized decisions. Embodiments of theinvention pertaining to Personalized Medicine are adapted to deliveressential, relevant medical information to caregivers for considerationwhen planning a patient's personalized medical treatment. For example,artificial experts may be utilized to assist in choosing appropriatedrugs and dosages for certain diseases or conditions, such as attentiondeficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, depression, and epilepsy.

In an embodiment, each document D_(i), i=1 . . . N(t) is represented bya row of j=1 . . . n(t) binary features; therefore the whole vectorrepresentation of all documents in iteration t is given by a matrix D(t)with N(t)×n(t) dimensions. The dimensions vary as new query terms arefound. UMLS contains relations R_(ij) between concepts i and j.Selecting only those concepts i that have been used as features tocreate matrix D(t) and those concepts j that are related to i andrepresenting the existence of each relation as a Kronecker δ_(ij), abinary matrix R(t) is created. Multiplying the two matricesD(t)R(t)=D′(t) gives an expanded matrix D′(t) with new columns definingenhanced feature space. These columns contain integer values indicatingthe document with which the new concept is associated. For class k=1 . .. K a binary vector C_(ki)=δ_(ij), i=1 . . . N(t) serves as a classindicator of all documents. To evaluate the usefulness of the candidatefeatures the Pearson correlation coefficients between these columns andall vectors that are class indicators are calculated. Only thosecandidate features with high correlation coefficients are retained.After removal of some matrix columns and binarization of the remainingones, D′(t) is converted to a new current matrix D(t+1).

Using spreading activation networks that are tuned with domainexpertise, machine-attempts to retrieve information should reach resultsclose to, or better than, human levels. Unfortunately ULMS is not anencyclopedia of medical knowledge and does not contain all associationsof an expert. Enriching UMLS relations by a supervised trainingprocedure may be done by updating the C(CUIi, CUIj) matrix for all pairsof concepts from an annotated corpus. One active search algorithm touncover new relations has been described recently. See, e.g., SzymanskiJ, Sarnotowicz T, Duch W. Towards Avatars with Artificial Minds: Role ofSemantic Memory. Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligence, AmericanScientific Publishers. 2006; In Press. In essence it may use the ULMSsemantic types and ontology to search for relations between subsets ofconcepts that belong to two semantic types (for example, “disease orsyndrome” and “sign or symptom”, in medical textbooks and othertrustworthy information sources.

A graphics tool has been created to facilitate manual corrections to therelations 222 between concepts 224 (FIG. 9). This tool builds uponsoftware for creating GCC's. The graphics tool may also be converted toexplore the ULMS concepts and relations. This tool can greatly simplifyadding links between concepts or removing wrong ones and improving theknowledge base for semantic memory.

The present invention provides a computerized system and method forperforming natural language processing of free text usingdomain-specific spreading activation. While the invention wouldtypically be hosted by a server connected to the Internet, the conceptcan include other types of networks, such as local area networks (LANs),wide area networks (WANs), and public data networks, by which clientworkstations obtain data from a server workstation.

Each workstation may comprise a microcomputer such as a personalcomputer, for example, including a system bus that is connected to acentral processing unit (CPU) and to memory, including read only memory(ROM) and random access memory (RAM). The system bus can be connected,via appropriate interfaces known to persons skilled in the art, tovarious input/output devices, including additional nonvolatile datastorage devices, video and audio adapters, keyboard, mouse, and otherdevices that provide input to the workstation or receive output from theworkstation. The workstation can also include a data port forcommunicating with other constituents of a collaborative data processingenvironment. The data port may be a serial port for linking theworkstation to a modem or a communications adapter for connecting theworkstation to a LAN.

Each workstation also typically includes software programs that arestored on the data storage devices or retrieved from other parts of adata processing system and loaded into RAM and then into the CPU forexecution. Among those programs is a client program that receivesmessages from, and transmits messages to, other workstations connectedto the network.

It is also within the scope of the invention that the software andassociated data stores be located and operational on a stand-alonecomputer system, or any other type of computerized system as known tothose of ordinary skill.

While exemplary embodiments of the invention have been set forth abovefor the purpose of disclosure, modifications of the disclosedembodiments of the invention as well as other embodiments thereof mayoccur to those skilled in the art. Accordingly, it is to be understoodthat the inventions contained herein are not limited to the aboveprecise embodiments and that changes may be made without departing fromthe scope of the invention as defined by the claims. Likewise, it is tobe understood that the invention is defined by the claims and it is notnecessary to meet any or all of the stated advantages or objects of theinvention disclosed herein to fall within the scope of the claims, sinceinherent and/or unforeseen advantages of the present invention may existeven though they may not have been explicitly discussed herein. Allreferences cited herein are incorporated by reference.

What is claimed:
 1. One or more non-transitory electronic memory devicesincluding computer instructions for performing a method comprising usinga central processing unit (CPU) to create, from a text of one or moredocuments containing natural language stored in a non-transitoryelectronic memory device, a semantic network having a plurality of nodescorresponding to sets of semantic and episodic concepts and weightedlinks between the sets of semantic and episodic concepts, the sets ofsemantic concepts consisting of a plurality of semantic conceptsassociated with a plurality of known words; the sets of episodicconcepts consisting of a plurality of episodic concepts associated withthe semantic concepts; and utilizing, using the CPU, spreadingactivation algorithms to refine the weighted links in the semanticnetwork.
 2. The one or more non-transitory memory devices of claim 1,further comprising, prior to the step of creating a semantic network,the steps of identifying, using the CPU, one or more of a plurality ofgroups of characters of the text as corresponding to at least one of theplurality of known words; querying a first database comprisingassociations between known words and semantic concepts to obtain thesets of one or more semantic concepts associated with each of the knownwords; querying a second database comprising associations betweenepisodic concepts, known words, and semantic concepts to obtain the setsof one or more episodic concepts associated with the sets of semanticconcepts, the episodic concepts being separate from the semanticconcepts.
 3. The one or more non-transitory memory devices of claim 1,further comprising, following the step of creating a semantic network,the step of selecting, using the CPU, at least one of the concepts fromthe sets of semantic and episodic concepts based upon an associatedweight for at least one node of the plurality of nodes derived from thestep of utilizing spreading activation.
 4. The one or morenon-transitory memory devices of claim 2, further comprising, using theCPU, configuring the text prior to the identifying step, by including atleast one of tagging parts of speech, replacing abbreviations withwords, and correcting misspelled words.
 5. The one or morenon-transitory memory devices of claim 3, further comprising outputting,using the CPU, the selected at least one of the concepts.
 6. The one ormore non-transitory memory devices of claim 1, wherein the textcomprises clinical free text.
 7. The one or more non-transitory memorydevices of claim 6, wherein the clinical free text comprises pediatricclinical free text.
 8. The one or more non-transitory memory devices ofclaim 1, wherein the text is of a plurality of documents and the methodfurther comprises identifying, using the CPU, a subset of the pluralityof documents by identifying at least two documents having associationswith the selected at least one of the concepts.
 9. The one or morenon-transitory memory devices of claim 8, further comprising outputting,using the CPU, an identification of one or more portions of each of theat least two documents having associations with the selected at leastone of the concepts.
 10. The one or more non-transitory memory devicesof claim 1, wherein the text comprises at least one suicide note and themethod further comprises evaluating, using the CPU, the suicide note forconcepts indicative of suicidal intent.
 11. A-One or more non-transitoryelectronic memory devices including computer instructions for performinga method comprising using a CPU for processing a text of one or moredocuments containing natural language, the method comprising tagging,using the CPU, parts of speech in the text; recognizing, using the CPU,known words in the text; and creating, using the CPU, a semanticnetwork, the semantic network including at least one of the recognizedknown words and at least one relationship with at least one semanticconcept associated with at least one of the recognized known words; andsupplementing the semantic network by iteratively adding additionalconcepts and additional relationships to the semantic network until atermination requirement is met, each additional concept being associatedwith at least a prior one of the concepts and additional concepts in thesemantic network by a respective additional relationship, at least oneof the additional concepts being an episodic concept separate from theat least one semantic concept.
 12. The one or more non-transitory memorydevices of claim 11, further comprising weighting each of the at leastone relationships and each of the additional relationships with aweighting value reflecting the strength of each relationship andadditional relationship; determining a minimum threshold weightingvalue; and terminating the iterative growth of any network node in whichthe weighting between the relationships and the additional relationshipsdo not satisfy the minimum threshold weighting value.
 13. The one ormore non-transitory memory devices of claim 12, further comprisingcomparing the at least one semantic concept and the additional conceptsto a list of known relevant concepts to generate a list of identifiedrelevant concepts; and providing an output based on at least one of anumber and a significance of the identified relevant concepts.
 14. Theone or more non-transitory memory devices of claim 13, wherein theoutput pertains to a probability of a particular occurrence.
 15. The oneor more non-transitory memory devices of claim 14, wherein the textincludes at least one suicide note and the particular occurrence is asuicide attempt.
 16. The one or more non-transitory memory devices ofclaim 12, wherein the text includes a plurality of documents and themethod further comprises receiving a query including a search concept;and displaying a list of documents including one or more of theplurality of documents that is associated with the at least one semanticconcept and the additional concepts that matches the search concept. 17.The one or more non-transitory memory devices of claim 16, wherein thelist of documents is sorted by the weighting value pertaining to atleast one relationship or additional relationship between the searchconcept and the corresponding recognized known word.
 18. The one or morenon-transitory memory devices of claim 17, wherein the one or moreepisodic concepts are uniquely associated with a patient's priorclinical history.
 19. The one or more non-transitory memory devices ofclaim 1 or 11, wherein the method further comprises, following the stepof creating a semantic network, iteratively expanding the semanticnetwork with additional concepts taken from the one or more databasesand linked to respective nodes in the semantic network to iterativelyadd new nodes to the semantic network for such additional concepts, eachnew node including a weighted link with an existing node, the additionalconcepts being separate from the first set of semantic concepts andincluding at least one episodic concept.
 20. The one or morenon-transitory memory devices of claim 19, wherein the computerinstructions are further configured to perform the step of repeating theiteratively expanding continuously until a termination requirement ismet.
 21. The one or more non-transitory memory devices of claim 20,wherein the termination requirement is a value of a weighted linkfalling below a predefined threshold.